A Brief History of ‘Thank You for Being a Friend’

“Thank you for being a friend … (duh-duh-DUH-DUH) … traveled down the road and back again … (duh-duh-duh-duh-DUH) … your heart is true … you’re a pal and a confidante ...”

The Golden Girlsturns 30 today, which means that its theme song is also having a birthday. But the iconic song is older than the NBC sitcom (actually, sitcoms) most commonly associated with it: It was written, and first released as a single, by the musician Andrew Gold, in 1978. It was “just this little throwaway thing,” he said, and it took him “about an hour to write.”

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Gold, the son of the Oscar-winning composer Ernest Gold and the singer Marni Nixon—she provided the singing voice for Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady and Natalie Wood in West Side Story—performed his song in a decidedly soft-rock kind of way. He sang it like like this:

Fee performed “Thank You for Being a Friend,” famously—and, warning, ear-wormily—like this:

Once it became associated with the lanai-tastic leisurewear of The Golden Girls, “Thank You for Being a Friend” took on a familiar trajectory: It became loved, in the kind of ironic-nostalgic way that makes the love, in a pop-culture context, endure. It was played during World Series games, and at the end of Super Bowl XL, and in, in a modified form, a cheeky NFL ad. (The lyrics in that case were adjusted to “thank you for being a fan,” natch.) It got meme-ified. It got tattooed. It got a replay, courtesy of Lenny, on The Simpsons. It got a death-metal rendition on Saturday Night Live. It got sassily ska-ified.

Quite a lot for a song that started life as “just this little throwaway thing.”

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Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where she covers culture.